Where are we between the OS Kernel, File Systems and Solid State Memory Technology. Hard Disk Drives have embedded controllers. Some applications use the concept of an I/O Controller. How much isolation (abstraction) does the application programmer need, want, have available. Micrium provides approaches to [some of] these issues, it would be good to walk through a few slides on where we are ... http://micrium.com/

ThomD Would like to hear more about parts with built-in ECC - such as Micron M60 (4 bit ECC) and ClearNAND - and flash translation layer changes to match this.

Well your FTL needs to support this of course. Ours allows you to specify zones to avoid in the spare area so that the device can store its ECC without overwriting other metadata. Software ECC of course needs to be disabled. Most devices will report ECC status through their status registers so that you will have to read the status register after read operations and also enable the on-chip ECC feature at initialization through some command (Get/Set Feature).

vsrollins: Good thing, not using ECC really is a bad idea, esp. with MLC or TLC devices. While it may work when immediately reading a programmed page, I wouldn't expect the data to remain valid very long.

Using NAND. Ran into the BER issue a few chip revisions ago. Software engineer was convinced ECC was unnecessary, but after much back and forth with vendor, datasheets, and ONFI standards finally saw reason.

@alanta luck has for the last six years, but i expect, as they get worn, they'll start giving problems. just replace the boards. again, they are not being used that much, only once a mission, not continuous random access.

developed 4GB and 24GB nand flash cards, with systems up to 480GB, with no ECC. Found ECC to be very processor time heavy and complicated. each page does have crc. it several hundered missions, there has been no errors detected. the flash are setup to write in sequence, not random, and in each mission, only one page will be used.

For my audio to work: I have to click the play button on the streaming audio player twice (2nd after the blog talk radio audio) to get it to stream for me. My company finely let the audio through last year.

The streaming audio player will appear on this web page when the show starts at 2pm eastern today. Note however that some companies block live audio streams. If when the show starts you don't hear any audio, try refreshing your browser.

@bitbanger55 - I saved it with LibreOffice and it shrank to 327K. But all the graphic elements now have a badly offset shadow. Looks like I'm viewing a 3D movie without the 3D glasses. Saving as pdf shrank it to 1.8M and that looks fine.

@StephMcGUBM - I second @ucschmidt's motion. Two minutes would be acceptable, five minutes would be better. If starting the audio stream before the hour is a problem, I would rather have music start at the hour, and the presentation two minutes later.

@Lauren Muskett.... Many individuals have suggested starting the player with music several minutes early. This will give us some time to get the audio working before the the lecture starts. This week I have been missing the first several minutes every day. Missing the introduction makes the rest harder to follow.

The streaming audio player will appear on this web page when the show starts at 2pm eastern today. Note however that some companies block live audio streams. If when the show starts you don't hear any audio, try refreshing your browser.

Day 5 slides seem to have lots of NAND flash technology background - it will be interesting to hear in the lecture how much of this an embedded system designer needs to actually deal with vs. it just being nice to know.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.